If 2 out of 100 people I know see a broken website, depending on the website, that's fine, that doesn't sound like a big deal. Now, if out of 10 power users, all ten of them see a broken site once every 50 logins? Thats a much bigger deal. 98% can be more than enough or not remotely enough depending on the units involved but there are plenty of cases where it's fine to not support the last 2 internet explorer users and stuff

Isn't this obvious?

In some categories, certainty and percentages make a lot of difference--surgeries, accidents. In some, they don't--surveys, grades.

It just depends on the category.

This is akin to saying something as obvious as more percentages are more than less percentages.

That framing is setting the question so you immediately are forced to compare pears to apples.

Of course 98% of sterilization is not enough for surgery or for precision in calculating your account balance but the category of landing page conversion a 98% would be astronomically high.

I like stuff that takes a statistic that we view one way and explains how to see it another way

in this sense, related https://danluu.com/p95-skill/

> Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?

This reminds me almost precisely of the dynamics of pro sports in the US and how fans are getting priced out of attending games or even watching teams on TV as organizations shift to bespoke streaming platforms.

But is it? Addressing 98%of TAM, is?

Suppose 98% users have not had any sessions crash. You want to build an addon feature that 10% of your users will buy and which will increase the revenue from those users by 30%.

Do you spend time building the feature, or trying to understand why 2% of users sometimes see crashes?

Software isn't the product though.

Just like the article says, it depends on if the product is an essential or a dessert.

If your product is a "essential necessity" one, then 98% is terrible for your software.

If your product is a "dessert", then for it's software 98% is awesome.

Space Shuttle missions returned their crew alive 98.5% of the time.

What about those 30% of audience to update their browser? On our web platform, the team currently displays a message along the lines of: 'Please update your browser; this site relies on features incompatible with your current version'.

The author is confusing visitors with customers. Refusing entry to 2% visitors? No, no! Forgetting about non-interesting 2% visitors? Not even a blink!